Sins and Scandals Collection. Nicola Cornick
Читать онлайн книгу.
of champagne and two glasses from an obliging footman and slipped out of the ballroom and up the stairs. He was aware that he was abusing Lord and Lady Grant’s hospitality quite shamefully since not only had he not been invited, he certainly had not been given the freedom of the house. But he needed to discover how much Merryn knew. He needed to stop her quest for justice. And this was the quickest way.
The first bedchamber he came to quite clearly belonged to Joanna Grant and was lush with exotic drapery and scented with perfume. It had a connecting door standing open to her husband’s dressing room. The second chamber was less easy to apportion to a member of the family and for a moment Garrick wondered if it was Merryn’s. There was a set of very beautiful and very explicit pencil drawings spilling from a folder on the dressing table—nudes in various stages of debauchery with gods, satyrs and nymphs. The drawings were good—and extremely erotic. One of the nymphs, small, lush, curved, looked a little like Merryn. She was lying on a bench, her hair spread, her drapes sliding from her rounded limbs, a small cherub bending to kiss her breast. Garrick felt his evening dress tightening in various strategic places as he contemplated the picture. His breath strangled in his throat.
Concentrate.
This was not the time to be imagining Lady Merryn Fenner stripped of her clothes and lying small yet voluptuous, naked, perfect, among the tangled sheets of his bed. Despite that it was, Garrick admitted to himself, the image that had haunted him since the moment he had met her. Then he had not known her identity; he had known nothing but the blazing attraction that had drawn him to her. Now, even though he knew she hated him, even though he knew all the barriers that stood between them, the attraction was no less.
This was not Merryn’s room, though. There were no books. Garrick closed the door softly behind him and wondered briefly if the rumors of Tess Darent driving all her ancient husbands to death with her incessant sexual demands were in fact true. He, accustomed to being the target of slander, had thought it nothing but idle gossip. Now he was not so sure.
The third room he entered was most definitely Merryn’s. It was plain and tidy, almost austere. There were no exotic furnishings here: a bed with a simple white cover, a wardrobe, a table with a pile of books. French love poetry, in the French language, of course, jostled with Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. There was an illustrated set of fairy stories and St. Augustine’s Confessions. And on the top, a bound book that looked suspiciously like a diary. Garrick picked it up, settled himself in an armchair, opened the book and started to read.
Ten minutes later he heard the patter of footsteps on the carpet outside and the turn of the doorknob, and then Merryn ran into the room. Because she was not expecting him to be there Garrick saw her in a totally unguarded moment. She wrenched the rose-colored bandeau from her head and cast it aside, kicking off her slippers at the same time. Her movements were jerky and exasperated, almost angry. She put both hands up to cover her face, digging her fingers into her intricately arranged golden curls, scattering the pins that restrained them. She made a sound of relief and release that was so heartfelt Garrick felt a stir of sympathy. She dropped her hands and put her head back so that her hair tumbled over her shoulders and down her back like a silver river. Her eyes were closed and her eyelashes—very fair and not artificially darkened—were spiky against the curve of her cheek. The line of her neck was pure and tempting. Garrick found that he wanted to grab her and bury his face against that silken skin, dropping his mouth to the vulnerable hollow of her throat, inhaling her scent, burying himself in her. She looked lush, sweet and very seductive.
He must have made some involuntary movement because her eyes snapped open and she saw him. Her gaze widened with shock and she took a breath.
“Don’t scream,” Garrick said. “It would not do your reputation any good.” He laid the book aside and got to his feet.
Merryn expelled the breath softly. He could hear a tremor in it though her voice was steady. “I never scream,” she said. “Not for mice, not for pickpockets and certainly not for intruders.”
She half turned aside from him, shielding her face, reaching for the shawl that was folded neatly over the back of her dressing table chair and wrapping it about her shoulders to cover the rose-pink ball gown. The room was hot, lit by a fire in the grate. Garrick thought she was wrapping herself up as much to add another layer of protection as for warmth. He could feel the withdrawal in her as she retreated from those moments when she had revealed so much of her feelings.
“I take it,” he said, “that balls are not to your taste.”
She shrugged a shoulder. “I only went to try to please Joanna. Your generous offer this morning—” scorn colored her voice “—has caused much trouble in this household, your grace.”
Garrick could imagine. If Tess Darent wanted to accept the money and Joanna and Merryn did not, or worse if Joanna and Tess wanted to accept and Merryn did not, then he could see that the Fenner family would be split down the middle, wrangling over an issue that could not but wake painful memories.
“I am sorry if that is the case,” he said. “Such was not my intention.”
Merryn fixed him with a very direct stare.
“What was your intention then, your grace?”
“To give back something that should never have been mine,” Garrick said.
He expected her to contradict him or at the least to make some derisive comment but she did neither. Her blue eyes searched his face as though she was weighing the truth of his words and after a moment she gave a tiny nod of acceptance. Garrick released the breath he had not been aware that he was holding. He felt relief and something more, something that almost felt like gratitude, as though she had given him a present beyond price. Then she straightened and the moment was gone.
“Were you looking for something?” she asked.
“Yes,” Garrick said. He smiled. “As were you, when you ransacked my bedroom.”
Her gaze flickered. She stiffened a little. It was interesting, Garrick thought, how transparent she was. Interesting, but extremely inconvenient for her. The lies she had spun him that night in his bedroom had been imaginative because she was clever, but deceit was not her natural state. She would always prefer to meet an enemy head-on.
She ignored his comment. “We must stop meeting in bedchambers,” she said. “It is not respectable. I suggest that you leave.”
Garrick smiled. “I am merely returning your visit, as a courtesy,” he said. “I don’t believe we finished our conversation at the library. I’d like to talk some more.” He phrased it politely but with iron beneath his words. She heard the note in his voice and her head jerked up; he felt her antagonism. It shivered like a mirage between them. Her anger was palpable and with it bitterness, and something more, something not so easily defined. Garrick knew she was acutely uncomfortable that he had invaded her bedchamber, a space she had thought was private to herself. And she was even more uneasy about the fierce physical awareness that trapped them both. Garrick knew that she felt it as much as he did and he sensed that she, so much less experienced than he, did not understand their mutual attraction. Nor did she like it. But she could not deny it.
“I do not suppose that you were invited tonight,” she said, her pansy-blue eyes considering him thoughtfully.
“No,” Garrick said.
“Then you could at least have shown a modicum of courtesy and sensitivity by staying away.”
“I could have done,” Garrick agreed, “but I did not. This is too important.”
Their gazes locked. The antagonism flowered again, strong and dark between them, once again with that undercurrent of something else, something hot and turbulent.
Garrick gestured to the champagne bottle resting on the table beside Merryn’s pile of books. “Would you care to join me?” he asked.
She paused and then nodded. “Thank you.” She motioned toward the glasses. “What a civilized intruder you are, your grace,” she said. “You think